Empowering Technology
An empowering network providing a community and toolset helping people train, equip and collaborate.
The Network facilitates activist communications activities. It provides a
diverse platform of services to make the tools of change freely
accessible and widely used to the fullest extent possible.
Earn Points
Empowering actions earn you points! Every page you create and every comment you make earns 1 point. Every friend you invite earns 10 points and every invitee who joins earns you 10 more points!
Invite Your Friends, Colleagues, Family, Classmates, Pets, Shrubberies
You can earn awards, win prizes and take pride in your outstanding efforts that earn lots of points by making the world a better place.
See The Points Rankings
Empowering Human Nature
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
—George Orwell
Net Empowerment’s premise is that the systems people live by are as important as the structures they live under. Where legislation, markets and propaganda may fail, the empowered individual can succeed through their own initiative. Activists can share their methods with others to empower anyone who elects to adopt the same system or innovate further.
Design Is Everything
The importance of the profiles and personal empowerment networking system’s exacting design cannot be overstated. Tiny differences in a network, an interface and a process can transform the entire organism into something new.
Net Progress Through Network Effects
Net Empowerment is derived from the economic term net profit.
Often referred to as the bottom line, net profit is calculated by subtracting a group's total expenses from total revenue, thus showing what the group has earned or lost in a given period of time such as a year.
In other words, there are pluses and minuses but in the final analysis the overall result is positive.
Earning profit and making progress is not so different. Similarly, empowering everyone means that some people will use it to help and others to hinder, but the bottom line is net progress and improvement.
This is sometimes described as elevating the playing field.
Network Effects
In a network, the larger the number of participants, the faster the network grows and the more powerful it becomes. All tech and culture constitutes a network. Bringing the largest possible number of people together to share one platform is the key to making the platform ubiquitou.
Imagining An Ideal System
"To know what to ask is already to know half." (Prudens quæstio dimidium scientiæ)
—Aristotle, Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy", ch.II
The idea behind Net Empowerment is to envision an ideal system to promote empowering culture and enable effective activism. Most systems have evolved to be "just good enough" to meet the needs of users and stay ahead of competing systems. Only rarely do we take a step back from our iiterative approach to improving how we do things to imagine what a perfect system would be like.
Learning From Prior Art
Groove, Near-Time, all these corporate collaboration systems
are full of good ideas that can be distilled into a perfect and rich
communications mediu,m.
Leveraging Off-The-Shelf Tools
Empowerment's software need not be developed entirely from
scratch. Many essential components already exist or can be improved to
meet ACTSPEC requirements with contributions to the larger project.
Reinventing the wheel is unnecessary in many cases.
Dethroning Infrastructural Tyranny
“Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained.”
—Frank Herbert, God Emperor Of Dune
Infrastructure exerts a power of its own that enthrones administrators
and discourages independent initiative. Just as Party leaders who
control member lists can shut out leadership challengers, so too can
web site owners exert dictatorial control over everything their users
do. Stalin gained an iron fist by the swish of a pen as party
secretary, and many organizations and movements have been run into the
ground by the gatekeepers of crucial infrastructure. In many cases the
gatekeepers would like to delegate their responsibilities to more
stakeholders, but their systems lack the fluidity to accommodate such
dynamic processes.
Decoupling Power From Infrastructure
There are now ways to decouple power from infrastructure. When you
empower people with open and federated infrastructure, you give them
the power to operate effectively without relying on an elite-controlled
system.
“Agriculture put productive power in
the hands of hard-working farmers. Industrialization put power in the
hands of factory owners. Corporatization put it in the hands of
corporations. Computerization put power in the hands of system
administrators."
Power is often based on control of infrastructure.
Push-Button Immediacy
"When the phrase “push button” is applied to any technology, that means the chasm has been crossed. The phase where only early adopters use the technology is over and now the general public can start using the technology too."
—http://www.historyofthebutton.com/
Systems can't rely on everyone customizing everything and engaging to a high degree.
Digging Is Minimum Effort Maximum Participation
Ubiquity
There is a qualitative difference between pervasive and niche technologies. A technological innovation that doesn't achieve ubiquity is of use only to those lucky enough to hear about it. A ubiquitous tech gets propagated by runaway network effects until nearly everyone that could benefit from it is doing so or will eventually.
Empowerment seeks to take many already existing tools and ubiquitize them by integrating them tightly into a framework that lends itself to popular adoption. It is conceivable that solutions to all problems already exist, undelivered to those who need them. Packaging all these solutions and distributing them en mass to those who need them is the key.
Furthering The Encyclopedic Tradition
Empowerment's core communities are following in the encyclopedic tradition begun by Denis Diderot. What began in the Age of Enlightenment is coming full circle in The Age of Empowerment. Our communities are called Skillpedia.org, Toolpedia.org, Ideapedia.org and Mediapedia.org. These serve to make a general education of empowerment free to all and freely editable.
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Mediapedia: Get Heard
